The Grand Finale (I Hope)

Last night we survived 3 separate thunderstorms.  The one I talked about yesterday where we had a tornado warning siren, and then two more during the night, but without the tornado scare.  When we woke up this morning, a quick check of the weather app showed that Ft Dodge was in an open space between storms, so we had a cup of coffee and a very quick breakfast and hit the road.

200 miles southeast of Ft Dodge is the little town of Moscow, IA, where HWH, the manufacturer of the leveling system for our motorhome, is located. We've had a couple of small issues with the system that they assure us will be resolved tomorrow. In the meantime, we are parked in the plant complex waiting for our appointment at 7:00 am.

We took a bit of a walk this afternoon about 3, just after we arrived and checked in, and saw that the clouds were building in the west.  There's no cable TV here, in fact just electricity, so we came back to the motorhome and set up the old-fashioned on the roof antenna. We picked up 33 local channels that were filled with storm warnings.  One channel had wall to wall coverage of the approaching storm, which promised to be a "good" one.

The fun started with a band of shelf clouds moving quickly across the sky, followed by a wide band of Mammatus clouds that are sometimes called egg clouds because they resemble a tray of eggs as seen from the bottom as if they were floating in water.  I didn't get a photo because almost immediately the sky turned an awful green color and the wind started to blow.  According to the tv station, we had 70 mph straight-line winds, with heavy rain, lightning and thunder.  Again, according to the tv, we've had just over 2 1/2 inches of rain in 1/2 hour! The photo above shows water pouring off the adjacent building.  The forecast was for baseball sized hail as the storm passed through.  Uh oh.

I made a quick run for the office to see if they had room for our motorhome inside the service building and got soaked through and through.  And they didn't have any room; all the bays were filled, so a quick run back "home", and with crossed fingers, we waited.

Here we are now, about 2 hours after the storm started, and the sky is cloudy, the rain has slowed, and the lightning and thunder are getting less and less.  No hail yet.  Welcome to Iowa.

Update:  The hail arrived.  There was a second band of storms about 2 hours after the first that contained strong winds, rain, and lightening like the first band, with hail added.  This is supposed to be the last of the storms until tomorrow evening.  The second storm began to clear just at sunset:

This is promising, although it's just started raining again…..Will it never end?